History museums engage millions of people each year in interpreting the past. Although well-known institutions such as the National Museum of American History and Colonial Williamsburg draw a significant share, museums of all sizes attract visitors through historical exhibits that explore topics such as family life, local communities, and social and cultural history. Exhibits are more than history put up on the walls, embracing the creative interjection of graphics and objects, photographs, re-created spaces, and interactive devices. In addition to historical content, exhibits entail interpretive judgments about cause and effect, perspective, significance, and meaning. They may memorialize events, celebrate common experiences, or raise controversial points of view. Unlike traditional academic products, exhibitions are inherently public, encouraging open and informed discussion of their themes.
While the academic discipline of history has developed a literature, vocabulary, and style for writing about the past, most historical exhibition scholarship is published in museum journals or unrecognized altogether. This column seeks to expand the collaboration between historians and museum professionals by establishing a forum for reviewing and analyzing exhibitions on their own terms. By publishing these reviews in Perspectives, we hope to create a record that will outlive the exhibitions themselves.
Successful exhibitions, like a novel or poem, use objects to tell stories that are more than just facts. They are three-dimensional, visual representations of a historical argument. They must be a window into dense research and complex ideas, yet accessible to non-experts. They are a form of visual poetry that allows a visitor to place themselves in the story and to connect, however vaguely, with bigger ideas. Historians and museum educators must be able to translate this complexity into a simple narrative and a compelling exhibit. Each article in this series will address these issues as it examines the intellectual underpinnings of an exhibition, how it relates to prevailing scholarly currents, and how it is conveyed to the museum audience through the physicality of its form.